by Ben Spatz
Published in Public 67 (2023): Return to the Body, edited by Bridget Cauthery and Jonathan Osborn.
Available from Intellect.
“If it is true that Jews have undergone a racial re-classification, can they still represent a challenge to the same structure that now welcomes them? In other words, can Jews still be a compelling source of decolonial proposals?” —Santiago Slabodsky
About ten years ago, I turned my artistic practice of song-based experimental theatre to focus on the question of jewish identity.2 Before me stood two monoliths. On one side, the european holocaust, its burden overwriting and displacing, even today, many attempts to contextualize death and genocide within a broader decolonial frame.3 On the other side, jewish euro-american cultural production, the ubiquitous and sometimes hidden contributions of jewish humour, music, and story telling to “american” culture. Neither of these, I knew, could be the starting point for my artistic research. In simple terms, they represent two starkly contrasting positionalities in relation to whiteness: utter abjection and profound assimilation. As Slabodsky implies, neither of these positional ities is capable of developing compelling proposals for the future of life on earth. And so I began to explore the space between: a liminal space, between death and ceremony.